Though it’s hard to deny that playing the latest PC and console games online with millions of other players across the world is arguably the most fun and challenging form of gaming around, there are some real drawbacks to limiting yourself only to the newest games.
First, new games are extremely expensive, easily outpricing even games from just a few years ago by three or four times as much, and outpricing older, vintage games by as much as ten to one. Second, even if you can afford the latest games, they require the latest generation of video game consoles or the most up-to-date gaming PC to play them. For laptop owners, especially, you can quickly find yourself unable to run the latest games even on your once top-of-the-range gaming laptops because that’s how quickly gaming systems evolve.
The good news is that the solution to this is the very definition of easy: pick up an older game that still has a vibrant online community and you can play it on a much cheaper, much less demanding system at a mere fraction of the cost.
How far back you want to go is entirely up to you, but you’d be surprised at just how vibrant online communities can be for games that don’t just go back into the past decade, but into the final decade of the last century!
Sports Games
One genre of gaming that only really work with the latest releases if you want to get the full multiplayer experience is sports games. Because games like FIFA base their games so heavily on their current real-world rosters, older versions of games tend to lose players by the truckload the minute the latest release comes out.
And it doesn’t really matter which sport, either. Take an NBA game. Sports video games are effectively built to represent teams from the current lineup and might even be based on the way each team lines up on odds comparison sites like sidelines.io – let alone how they ultimately end up doing.
Also, frankly, however huge the fandom is for sports in the real world, in terms of video games and even esports, the genre just doesn’t have the rabid fanbase of first-person shooters, RPGs, and third-person shooters.
Take a look at how some classic games from these genres persist over time.
Doom And Quake
The MacDaddies of 1990s first-person shooters and the two games from ID studios that really defined the genre retain massive online communities to this day. Doom and its sequel (Doom 2) came out in 1992 and 1994, respectively, and brand new mods are released by the dozen with each new year. They even have their own awards, called the Cacowards that list the top ten to 20 best mission packs, total conversions, and megawads that are released over the past year. These can be very similar to the original games or massive overhauls that make them play like the best modern shooting games. Either way, they provide hours of entertainment that require only the investment in the original games on Steam, for example, because all the mods are entirely free… and legal!
And, if Doom still reigns supreme in terms of single-player mods, Quake and its many successors all still have highly active multiplayer communities where countless old-school fans play classic and custom maps. All for the fairly simple reason that though newer games provide more complex shoot-em-up experiences, Quake’s beautifully simple and addictive gameplay still just can’t be beat.
Starcraft And World of Warcraft
It’s not just first-person or third-person shooters where the classic games remain as attractive as ever. Strategy games like Starcraft and MMORPGs like World of Warcraft – the defining games in their respective genres that are both more than 20 years old – are, in many ways, as popular as ever.
It’s not hard to see why. Starcraft perfected real-time strategy games and every other game in the genre has been trying to catch up with it, usually failing. Especially with stellar 3D graphics never really being the main selling point of these kinds of games, newer games bring little to the table that is actually all that new.
World of Warcraft, however, wasn’t just the first of its kind, it remains the most addictive MMORPG game in the history of the genre. It has been better many times over, at least in the graphics and sound department, but for immersive gameplay that has players hooked for endless hours at a time, it just can’t be beaten.
So hit up Steam or the Epic Store and look up some classic games from years and decades past and be surprised at just how much these games hold up – and how cheap they now are to play.
0 comments on “Classic Video Games With Surprisingly Active Communities”